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Investigating variation in island effects

A case study of Norwegian wh-extraction

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Abstract

We present a series of large-scale formal acceptability judgment studies that explored Norwegian island phenomena in order to follow up on previous observations that speakers of Mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian accept violations of certain island constraints that are unacceptable in most languages cross-linguistically. We tested the acceptability of wh-extraction from five island types: whether-, complex NP, subject, adjunct, and relative clause (RC) islands. We found clear evidence of subject and adjunct island effects on wh-extraction. We failed to find evidence that Norwegians accept wh-extraction out of complex NPs and RCs. Our participants judged wh-extraction from complex NPs and RCs to be just as unacceptable as subject and adjunct island violations. The pattern of effects in Norwegian paralleled island effects that recent experimental work has documented in other languages like English and Italian (Sprouse et al. 2012, 2016). Norwegian judgments consistently differed from prior findings for one island type: whether-islands. Our results reveal that Norwegians exhibit significant inter-individual variation in their sensitivity to whether-island effects, with many participants exhibiting no sensitivity to whether-island violations whatsoever. We discuss the implications of our findings for universalist approaches to island constraints. We also suggest ways of reconciling our results with previous observations, and offer a systematic experimental framework in which future research can investigate factors that govern apparent island insensitivity.

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Notes

  1. One possibility—for many, but not all of our experiments—would be to extract indirect objects from matrix and embedded clauses. We encourage future researchers to conduct this comparison if they are concerned about the potentially confounding effect of grammatical role discrepancies.

  2. The observant reader will note that the complement of the noun nyheten (‘the news’) is a PP, headed by om (‘about’), rather than a bare CP, as in English. Clausal complements to N must always be wrapped in a PP (see Lødrup 2004), thus this difference from the English examples is unavoidable.

  3. Given that the subject island effects that we observed are relatively large, an experiment that tested the Norwegian equivalent of (13) would serve as an excellent cross-validation. We expect that the subject island effect should be large enough to survive the filled-gap effect and the potential floor effect of the design in (13). We leave such a validation to future research.

  4. Some authors have proposed that only subject RCs allow extraction (Platzack 2000; Kush et al. 2013), but this has been disputed (Engdahl 1997; Lindahl 2014). It was also initially proposed that indefiniteness is a necessary condition for acceptable RC extraction, but this claim is contradicted by some attested examples (Maling and Zaenen 1982; Engdahl 1997).

  5. An appendix containing all test and filler materials, as well as by-item summary statistics for filler items have been included as Supplementary Materials.

  6. We found no consistent age, gender, or dialect differences between groups of accepters and rejecters.

  7. The authors are not clear on how to ensure this, though we speculate that it might be effected through a mechanism like den Dikken’s Phase Extension (den Dikken 2007), Gallego’s Phase Sliding (Gallego 2010), or Bobaljik and Wurmbrand’s (2005) dynamic notion of domain.

  8. The account was initially designed to explain the ability to extract from RCs. We return to this point later.

  9. Of course, this claim merits more rigorous experimental verification so that the comparison with our results would be appropriate.

  10. Miyagawa (2004), building off Beck’s (1996) notion of a Quantifier Induced Barrier, argues that scope intervention effects emerge when a wh-phrase is separated from its restrictor by a scopal operator (such as whether). ‘Referential’ wh-phrases—which Miyagawa terms ‘presuppositional’ following Cresti (1995), Beck and Kim (1997), and others—avoid scope intervention because their restrictors are interpreted ‘high’ above the intervener. Under this implementation, variable scope intervention effects track whether participants adopt a presuppositional/non-presuppositional reading of the wh-phrase, because this choice determines the position of the wh-phrase’s restrictor at LF. Under this approach, the variability that we see in Norwegian whether-islands must correlate with whatever triggers presuppositional versus non-presuppositional readings of the wh-phrase.

  11. An anonymous reviewer notes that adding a +NP feature to a bare wh-word might be seen as reducing to a formal encoding of D-linking within the fRM framework.

  12. We would like to point out that we are aware of no published experimental evidence that context can “D-link” a bare wh-word: Sprouse (2007) was unable to create a D-linking effect on Superiority violations using context alone, and Villata et al. (2016) were unable to create a D-linking effect on wh-island violations using context alone. If this state of affairs continues, it either means that D-linking is the wrong analysis for these effects or that the contexts used in these experiments are not sufficient to induce the relevant discourse-linking.

  13. We point out that this interpretation differs from the D-linking explanation outlined above in that a background context is, in principle, not necessary for adopting an individual reading of the wh-phrase. Szabolcsi and Zwarts (1993) do note, however, that D-linking may assist in allowing participants to generate an individual reading of an otherwise naturally ordered domain, or may speed up search through an unordered domain.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported, in part, by NIH NRSA grant 5F32HD080331 to DK and NSF grants BCS-0843896 and BCS-1347115 to JS. The authors wish to thank Caroline Heycock and three anonymous reviewers for feedback that helped us improve the paper. Versions of this work were presented at a variety of venues, including the 2015 LSA conference, NTNU, UCONN, and UMASS, where audiences provided insightful discussion. We thank Alex Drummond for creating and maintaining the IbexFarm platform. Susanna Brock, Filippa Lindahl, Ragnhild Eik, and Maria Boer Johannessen provided assistance with the materials, logistical support and helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Language and Literature, NTNU: Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Dave Kush

  2. NTNU: Norwegian University of Science and Technology, UiT: The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

    Terje Lohndal

  3. University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Jon Sprouse

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  1. Dave Kush
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Correspondence to Dave Kush.

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Kush, D., Lohndal, T. & Sprouse, J. Investigating variation in island effects. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 36, 743–779 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-017-9390-z

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